The head of the most important startup farm in Silicon Valley thinks valuations are too high

Y Combinator head Sam Altman agrees with other recent complaints
that early stage startups are often overvalued.

But he blames investors, not the founders who started those
companies.

His remarks counter a Twitter
rant earlier this month from Dave McClure of rival
accelerator 500 startups, who criticized some founders for
insisting on high valuations, then balking at terms that would
protect small investors in case of an early exit.

McClure wrote "YOU might be worth a million (someday), but
your pre-revenue company is not... and it def ain't worth $8-12M+
cap."

Here's what Altman said on Twitter earlier today:

1) this is the time of year when my inbox fills up with investors complaining about valuations of YC companies.

Altman's opinion on seed-stage valuations is worth noting because
Y Combinator is the most famous and certainly one of the most
successful startup "accelerator" in Silicon Valley. Companies
started there include two so-called decacorns – private companies
valued above $10 billion — in Airbnb and Dropbox, plus numerous
other big success stories like payments company Stripe (recently
valued above $3 billion) and online game-viewing company Twitch
(bought by Amazon for almost $1 billion last year).

These days, graduating from YC is pretty much a guarantee that a
company will be able to raise at least a seed round. But these
rounds are probably going to be expensive for investors.